San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News First Customers to Go Live
NEW YORK, Sep 24, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Emmy(R) Award nominee and Golden Globe(R) Award winner Jon Hamm of AMC's original drama series Mad Men(R), today joined Yahoo!'s Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang, President Sue Decker and Executive Vice President of Yahoo! U.S. Hilary Schneider for the 5th annual Advertising Week conference in New York to announce the launch of APT from Yahoo!. Formerly known as AMP!, APT from Yahoo! is an intelligent innovation in online media, a digital advertising solution that streamlines the process of planning, buying and optimizing display advertising. APT is designed to simplify the process of buying and selling ads online while connecting all the market players -- publishers, advertisers, agencies, networks, partners and developers -- from a unified platform to do business more efficiently and effectively. The platform is rolling out as planned in phases beginning with publishers the San Francisco Chronicle of Hearst Newspapers and San Jose Mercury News of MediaNews Group.
"The advertising landscape has changed dramatically since the days when Don Draper was roaming the halls of Sterling Cooper," said Jerry Yang. "While Mad Men celebrates the Madison Avenue of 40 years ago, APT from Yahoo! clearly represents the future."
As a Web-based solution with the potential to allow unprecedented ease of cross-selling across the largest open network of publishers, advertisers, ad networks and agencies from a single integrated interface, APT is a single platform for connected digital advertising, including ad serving, ad network and ad exchange. It is designed to streamline advertisers' ad-buying process for multiple accounts across multiple publishers, and enable creative testing and campaign optimization. It is also intended to help advertisers precisely yet easily identify audiences through geographic, demographic and interest-based targeting while enabling publishers to better monetize their content as well as making better connections across the Web.
"One of the major benefits of APT from Yahoo! is the fact that it's an open system, designed to enable advertisers to reach their audiences in their favorite places across the Web, and publishers to monetize inventory across the broadest possible demand channels," said Sue Decker. "As we transform the advertising marketplace, we're excited to have key members of the Newspaper Consortium, the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News, lead the way in this historic journey."
For publishers like the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News, APT is designed to improve monetization capabilities and increase advertising revenue with solutions targeted at accelerating the ability to take advantage of premium brand and performance-based advertising. Key benefits include:
-- Fostering a more transparent marketplace through the ability to connect to new business partners for cross-selling;
-- Providing ad selection and inventory management tools to match relevant ads to marketers' target audience; and
-- Allowing publishers to manage their own private networks.
"The Newspaper Consortium's open, collaborative and exciting partnership with Yahoo! is enabling a crucial transformation in the newspaper industry," said George Irish, President, Hearst Newspapers. "With this next-generation platform we can realize the powerful combination of Yahoo!'s technology innovations, national reach and partner network with the Consortium's rich local content, sales forces and local market expertise."
"When Yahoo! showed us the platform's potential in February this year, the Newspaper Consortium was impressed by Yahoo!'s commitment and investment in a game-changing technology that would significantly advance our efforts to monetize the Web," said William Dean Singleton, Vice Chairman and CEO, MediaNews Group. "Seven months later, I am very proud to announce that Yahoo! has executed, and we are jointly accelerating toward fully using the platform to aggregate inventory, target relevant audiences and drive revenue growth."
Some of the initial capabilities featured in the new platform include:
-- Guaranteed cross-selling with pre-defined selling rules
-- Ad Exchange for non-guaranteed inventory
-- Advanced audience targeting techniques based upon behavior and geography
-- Inventory lookup and forecasting across individual and partner sites
-- Creative workflow automation and personalization
-- Powerful rate card tools for improved yield management
-- Filters for better controls around creatives
-- Flexible and powerful APIs
-- Federated ad call to support multiple ad formats
Yahoo! has developed a systematic integration plan for adding other Newspaper Consortium partners onto APT throughout this year and into next year. APT is a significant component of the unique and deep collaboration between Yahoo! and America's newspapers. Launched in 2006 with 176 newspapers across the United States, the strategic partnership to create one of the largest and most comprehensive advertising networks in the online industry now comprises 35 media companies spanning 784 newspapers.
Yahoo! will start to make the platform available to other parties including advertisers, publishers, networks and agencies in 2009.
Additional information on APT is available at http://apt.yahoo.com. For press materials including executive bios, APT screen shots and images visit http://apt.yahoo.com/newsworthy.
